ETA: Twitter was ablaze last night with the news that Bertrice Small has died. Although I could not find any formal announcement online, I wanted to include mention of this in the news this morning and let you know that I will post an obituary in the news, once some are published.

Google bans ‘explicit’ adult content from Blogger blogs – So this is bad. Beginning next month, Google will be deleting blogs on its Blogger platform that contain “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video.” Blog owners will retain access to their content, but the only other people who will be able to see it will be those who have specifically been given permission to by the blog owner. Google tried to preserve some semblance of respect for free expression with the following caveat: “We’ll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or presented where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content.” Of course, Google will be making these determinations, and what makes them think anyone will trust them to do so reasonably and objectively. Moreover, adult content represents a very broad category of content:

Rather than leave its already-restricted adult content alone, Google has told Blogger users it will be eliminating all adult blogs from public access on March 23, 2015, (and taking them out of all forms of search). . . .

James Gunn Defends Comic Book Films After Oscars, Indie Spirit Awards Pile-On – So in the film awards circuit, comics (and films on which they’re based) are the equivalent of genre Romance — popular work perceived to be lacking artistic merit and respectability. James Gunn, who directed “Guardians of the Galaxy,” called out some of the hypocrisy in some of the condemning comments (and commenters).

“The truth is, popular fare in any medium has always been snubbed by the self-appointed elite,” Gunn wrote on his Facebook page.“What bothers me slightly is that many people assume because you make big films that you put less love, care and thought into them than people do who make independent films or who make what are considered more serious Hollywood films.”

Throughout the weekend’s awards shows, comic book movies got a spanking. In the Oscars’ opening number, Jack Black sang about the preponderance of superhero movies, and presenter Liam Neeson seemed to momentarily forget about his performance in “Batman Begins” when he also bemoaned their popularity in a series of scripted remarks. –Variety

Download Pink Floyd’s 1975 Comic Book Program for The Dark Side of the Moon Tour – Speaking of comics, Open Culture, repository of some of the most eclectic content online, has found a comic book program for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon concert tour for fans to download. I’m assuming most of you know Pink Floyd and this awesome album, but even if you don’t (in which case I fear for the fate of classic rock), the comic sounds like a cool piece of musical and cultural history:

For all their serious brooding and biting digs at the establishment, the members of Pink Floyd were not above having a little fun with their image. Take this 1975 comic book, created by their record cover designer Storm Thorgerson’s company Hipgnosis for the Dark Side of the Moon tour. A “Super, All-Action Official Music Programme for Boys and Girls,” the 15-page oddity—pitched, writes Dangerous Minds, “somewhere halfway between ‘professional promotional item’ and ‘schoolboy’s notebook scribbling’”—includes several short comic stories: Roger (“Rog”) Waters is an “ace goal-scorer” for the “Grantchester Rovers” football club. Floyd drummer Nick Mason becomes “Captain Mason, R.N.,” a “courageous and smart” WWII naval hero, and David Gilmour gets cast as stunt cyclist “Dave Derring.” The juiciest part goes to keyboardist Richard Wright, whose salacious exploits as high roller “Rich Right” complete the proto-Heavy Metal vibe of the whole thing. –Open Culture

A writer named Emily Brontë
Had a passionate fling with Tom Conti.
On their rapturous nights
She’d reach wuthering heights
Crying YES like the Man from Del Monte.

If you’re wincing or cringing right now, check out their explanation/rationalization below:

As limericks were such a favourite literary pastime of the Victorians – as attested by the popularity of Edward Lear’s limericks in his Book of Nonsense (1846) – we’ve set ourselves the task of writing some limericks about Victorian writers. The results of our efforts are documented below. Where possible, we’ve tried to incorporate biographical facts into the poems, such as Thomas Carlyle’s dyspepsia, but this has not always been easy – so sometimes, I’m afraid, we’ve fallen back on a bit of good old-fashioned absurdist nonsense. In our defence, such a strain of nonsense is a staple of the limerick form as it was practised by the Victorians. –Interesting Literature

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isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnÊ¼t know, didnÊ¼t think about, or didnÊ¼t feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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So all those people whose blogs are already labeled ‘mature content,’ where for years visitors had to click to view, now have less than four weeks to move to a different blogging platform or, basically, be shut down.

Good going, Google, policing other people’s morality.

As for the derision blockbuster films and any popular fiction, what else is new? Only the ‘smart’ people ‘get’ the artistic merits of ‘quality’ art in any form, don’t you know? If it makes money, it’s obviously cheap trash.

I wonder how many of the people deriding comic book movies noticed that the guy who directed the 4 hour version of Hamlet, also directed Thor? And didn’t they give a Best Actor Oscar to someone for their role in a movie based on a comic book a few years back?

Google has been remarkably tone deaf with regards to social media over the years. First the terribly-handled Google Buzz, then the underwhelming Google Plus, and now they are killing Blogger. My own blog would probably pass the adult content test, but this has given me reason to move to a new platform. I had been considering it for some time, for a variety of reasons. I can’t help but wonder if Google is deliberately emulating Facebook’s content rules in order to allow blog posts to continue to be linked on Facebook.

I wager that Google will set up an algorithm that will look for keywords in the posts and the comments, and never have a real human look at what they’re bumping off (or leaving) unless someone lawyers up for some reason.

ZDnet it totally misreporting this and they’re fanning hysteria to no one’s benefit. Google/Blogger did NOT say they were taking action against “all adult blogs” as reported. In fact, they SAID POINT BLANK, oh hell, I’m just going to quote the actual policy notice here:

Changes you’ll see to your existing blogs

If your existing blog doesn’t have any sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video on it, you won’t notice any changes.

So no, that long list of people with “adult” blogs will NOT all be deleted/made private come the 23rd. Bad reporting ZDnet. Bad. That said, a robust discussion of just what you get from “free” sites that control/own your domain and police your content is well worth having. Free isn’t actually free, the cost just isn’t in dollars and cents.

@Lostshadows: Not sure but maybe you’re thinking of Heath Ledger winning Best Supporting Actor in 2009 for his amazing Riddler performance in The Dark Knight. He won posthumously which I think the “elite” pointed at as the reason he won but it was a standout performance.

Does anyone really believe that Bradley Cooper or Natalie Portman can’t bring their acting chops to any role they take on, be it indie film or blockbuster? I hope James Gunn and Joss Whedon keep speaking out and making great movies.

Google is a private company and can make its own choices, but this one seems like a particularly bad choice, which may have other consequences as well. For years, Google has pushed back on demands from copyright holders to magically monitor all its content, saying that it’s just not possible. Yet, here it is now saying that it’s willing to do exactly that, including making “artistic” judgments on the merits of whether adult content is purely prurient or done for a more artistic or educational reason. The company seems to be opening itself up to charges that if it can make such determinations for that type of content, it can also magically figure out what other content is “infringing” or not. This seems like a move that the company will regret.

Moreover, even if it won’t affect “all adult blogs,” it is probably going to affect a lot of authors of erotic romance and authors who use nude photos on their blog. Who knows what their definition of “sexually explicit or graphic nude images” is? There are a ton of m/m authors who post photos that might fall under that restriction, and presumably there are authors of m/f romance with high heat levels who do the same.

The biggest issue is not putting the blog behind an adults-only interstitial page (which is easy to click through), but the question of whether they’ll remove those blogs from search results. Right now they show up in searches but with an interstitial you have to click through. The new rule (a) lets Google override bloggers’ own definitions of adult content; and (b) makes the blogs more aggressively private (you’ll have to grant access to people individually). So much for discoverability through author blogs of the type allowed in the past.

@Sunita: Google has a pattern of prudishly trying to control its content. When you see a trend, it’s not alarmist to follow it to its potential conclusion.

On Bertrice Small’s passing, I am increasingly angry that I cannot find any official obituaries, using any of the usual online searches. Yes, publishers, editors, romance magazines, bloggers and readers all have tweeted (and some written amazingly moving posts) about her passing, but seriously, not even a local paper obituary?

Something else that is problematic is how long some of the now-verbotten blogs have existed using Blogger as their platform. Broken links is seriously the smallest of concerns going forward–I know that if Karen Knows Best had not moved to WordPress when it did, we would be closing the doors about now.

I am not surprised at all by Google’s decision to remove adult content. For several reason but the biggest two are:

One – they are now a publicly traded company. They do have to answer to the shareholders and many people who can afford decent blocks of stock in the popular tech companies are conservative white males. It naturally follows that a subtle (or possibly unsubtle) pressure was applied to remove/eliminate adult content/nudity from the platform because even though such men like to read/view porn they don’t like to be seen as “support the easy access to pornography to children” and Goggle’s little gateway is very easy to just click past.

Two – Google has expanded its reach into many extremely conservative areas worldwide. Rather than create a multi-tier platform based on locality determining what things you see through your Google account, they are just going to eliminate certain properties. Possible it might not even be “what you see” as opposed to “what is publicly hosted on their servers” if they plan to put a server farm in some of those countries where access to pornography is against the law. They could be seen as violating that law by having a backup copy of these adult blogs on those server farms.

So, yes, I can see why they are doing it. Their dominant item – that which rakes in money hand over fist for them – is their search engine. They probably looked at all the variables and decided that they can afford to lose the adult bloggers to WordPress or other platforms without making to much of a dent in the bottom line.

Me – I just didn’t like Blogger and it’s platform. I’m a WordPress and Dreamwidth user myself.

@MB: On your first point: Google has been a publicly traded company for over 10 years. Unless you have evidence that there have been major shifts in shareholders to ones who have an outsized interest in the amount of adult content on Blogger, that explanation isn’t tenable.

On your second point: Google isn’t blocking access to pornography, it’s blocking public access to “adult content.” Pornography is a subset of adult content, but they are not identical. And Google has plenty of experience censoring content to specific countries; it self-censored in the google.cn domain, for example.

I haven’t seen an explanation of what’s behind Google’s policy change, but perhaps it’s simply that they don’t want to have to consider whether something being shared from Blogger is going to be censored at the downstream sites. I have no idea. I’m more interested in the effects than the motivations. They’re a business, they can do what they want as long as enough customers are willing to accept it.

JK Simmons took a shot at superhero movies at the Independent Spirit awards on Saturday. Which made me laugh, as he spent plenty years playing J Jonah Jamieson.
I love the superhero movies. I also love indies. It really annoys me that indies refuse to acknowledge that it’s the massive profits those superhero movies make that makes sure there’s money available for those indies to make it to the movie theaters at all. Distribution funds don’t just magically appear.

We have received several questions from users about this change of policy that we wanted to clarify.

Why is Blogger making this change?
As Blogger has evolved, so has our understanding of how important it is to have a more aligned approach to policies across Google’s hosted products (which include products like YouTube or Google+).

Why did I receive an e-mail about this change if my Blogger doesn’t have any pornography in it?
We have e-mailed every user that has one or more blogs marked as “YES” for adult content. If you have received the e-mail but your site doesn’t have any pornography, you don’t need to worry.

Adult content doesn’t automatically mean pornography to me. Adult just means not suitable for children and extreme violence and other adult themes fit into that. Porn is just one thing on a fairly long list IMO.

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